Our recent book purchases include iconic Jewish contributions to American theater, literature, and society.

Our Exodus: Leon Uris & The Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story by M.M Silver. Despite the dramatic circumstances of its founding, Israel did not inspire sustained, impassioned public discussion among Jews and non-Jews in the United States until Leon Uris's popular novel Exodus was released in 1958. Uris's novel popularized the complicated story of Israel's founding and, in the process, boosted the morale of post-Holocaust Jewry and disseminated in popular culture positive images of Jewish heroism. The book examines the phenomenon of Exodus and its largely unrecognized influence in America and around the world.

Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof by Barbara Isenberg. Since it first opened on Broadway in September, 1964, Fiddler on the Roof has constantly been onstage somewhere, whether in Broadway revivals, London's West End or thousands of schools, army bases and countries. Barbara Isenberg interviewed the men and women behind the original production, as well as the film and significant revivals--to produce a lively, popular chronicle of the making of Fiddler. Tradition! is the book for everyone who loves Fiddlerand can sing along with the original cast album.

Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger. Elie Wiesel was a towering presence on the world stage—a Nobel laureate, activist, adviser to world leaders, and the author of more than forty books. But when asked, Wiesel always said, “I am a teacher first.” Ariel Burger—devoted protégé, apprentice, and friend—takes us into the sacred space of his classroom where he challenged students to explore moral complexity and resist the dangerous lure of absolutes. In bringing together never-before-recounted moments between Wiesel and his students, Witness serves as a moral education in and of itself—a primer on educating against indifference, the urgency of memory, individual responsibility, and the role of literature, music, and art in making the world a more compassionate place.

Lake Success: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart. The author spent the first 7 years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia(he alternately calls it "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg"). He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, describing his family as typically Soviet. “The fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature—movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation—are what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel.”—The New York Times Book Review.